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California has been car country since the 1930s when oil, autos, and road building all merged their interests and produced an American dream on four wheels. The first California freeway was built before WW II and by 1947, the state legislature had already approved plans for a statewide freeway system. The postwar state population explosion also demanded plans for new housing construction that real estate developers were all too happy to meet with their California ranch-style house, mass produced and marketed for “California living.” The new suburbs, to be connected by the new freeways, were the intended consequences of city and regional planners. The highway planners, both in Washington and California, however, did not foresee all of the problems of suburban development, including smog and other environmental damage produced by so many cars traveling on new highways to and from the new suburbs. One of the unintended consequences of highway planning, was the federal government’s role in promoting segregation in the new suburbs. These consequences can be highlighted in the East Bay of California, and particularly Oakland.

During WW II California defense industries drew thousands of workers from all over the country, including large numbers of African Americans from Louisiana, Texas, Arkansas, and Oklahoma. Oakland’s black population before the war was 8,462. By 1950 it had grown to 47,562. Richmond, home of Kaiser Shipyards, had 270 black people in 1940. By 1950 the number was 13,374. Housing for all workers was always overcrowded and during the war years was never solved. After the war, the solution to the housing crisis for East Bay African American families, however, was not the same as it was for white families.

Politically liberal city planners in late 1940s Oakland tried to provide new public housing for many of its now unemployed and low-income black families after the federal Housing Act in 1949 provided funding for urban redevelopment. Conservative anti-public housing forces, however, defeated any attempts to build low-rent housing projects, thus forcing displaced black families evicted from temporary war housing into already overcrowded black neighborhoods which eventually expanded into new all-black neighborhoods. Flatland neighborhoods in Berkeley, Oakland, and Richmond, by the mid-fifties, became rigidly segregated communities.

As war-housing units were demolished and black families moved into already crowded black neighborhoods, white families moved into both white neighborhoods within city limits and suburbs being constructed in undeveloped agricultural flatlands. Cities planned these suburban developments with low tax incentives for builders and perspective industries. By the mid-fifties, real estate associations, conservative city planners and the federal government housing policies excluded minorities in order to maximize property values. The federal government exclusions stemmed from 1930s New Deal policies defining crowded black and mixed race communities as high risk because of high crime rates; subsequently, through a practice called redlining, the Federal Housing Authority (FHA) refused to extend its mortgage guarantee programs into such undesirable neighborhoods until the 1960s. Organization such as the Home Owner’s Loan Corporation (HOLC), created in 1933, had developed a method of property appraisal for various neighborhoods based on first grade A, white residents and fourth grade D, African American residents. D neighborhoods such as Watts, Los Angeles were red-lined by HOLC officials. The FHA followed this appraisal method of racial worth and insisted on racial homogeneity as a condition for home ownership; thus, guaranteeing white suburbanization.

California had already built a number of limited-access highways, under the Collier-Burns Act of 1947; thus promoting early suburbanization, especially in southern California. By the time President Eisenhower signed the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956, over 2,000 miles of the state’s existing and planned routes were designated as Interstates. The state and local governments received an infusion of federal money to continue developing the new highway system that connected cities and their new suburbs in the mid-fifties. The new interstate system promoted continued suburbanization, and with it exclusionary practices that encouraged white families to move out of the cities; thus, exacerbating inner city deterioration.

The intersection of federal housing policies that favored single-family homes for white families and the federal interstate system that connected them helped produced the social, economic, and racial landscapes of modern 21st Century America. These landscapes are not accidents of history, nor are they just unintended consequences of human action. Various groups, at one time or another, between the 1940s and the 1960s, wanted better homes and sustainable and thriving industries in their communities. Too often one group opposed another as interests shifted, as did the consequences of group action.